After a disappointing first year with her OWN network (The Oprah Winfrey Network), The AP asked her about turnaround plans for 2012. She’s got plans that include more of her own shows (finally), however, if the channel continues floundering, Winfrey said she has a Plan B: “If this doesn’t work out, I’m going to go into organic farming in Maui. And I’m not kidding.”
“Yes, some mistakes were made. Who hasn’t made mistakes? The real beauty is you can say, ‘I learned from that,'” Winfrey said. “I don’t worry about failure. I worry about, ‘Did I do all I could do?'”
The cable channel, which marked its first year 1/1, is trying for a fresh start after executive turnover and missteps — despite a Discovery Communications investment of a reported $250 million and counting. So far, OWN has failed to improve on the modest ratings earned by Discovery Health channel it replaced.
Year two for OWN will reflect executive changes made last July, when Winfrey expanded her role at the channel by adding the roles of CEO and chief creative officer to her position as chairman. Discovery Communications COO Peter Liguori had filled in as interim head after OWN CEO Christina Norman was dismissed.
OWN has averaged about 136,000 viewers a day, a drop of 8% from what Discovery Health drew in 2010, although it’s up slightly in total viewers in prime time and has seen an 8% increase among women 25-54.
Shows include “The Judds,” which ran for six episodes in April and May; “Our America With Lisa Ling”; and the reality series “Welcome to Sweetie Pie’s.”
Although the channel’s ownership is split evenly between Discovery and Winfrey’s Harpo Inc., it’s Discovery’s money that’s on the line.
With more scheduling consistency, movies, original series with and without Winfrey, and “a lot more Oprah in general,” Discovery is “a lot more confident that we’re heading in the right direction,” spokesman David Leavy.
Sheri Salata and Erik Logan, two veteran Harpo executives, were brought on board to share the title of OWN president, with Logan moving from Chicago to OWN’s LA HQ. Logan said he clearly understands the hard work in establishing any cable channel: “One of the greatest gifts and challenges is to have her name on the door,” Logan said of his top boss. “Everything you do garners a high level of scrutiny and attention. … We don’t run from that.”
This past Sunday (1/1) “Oprah’s Next Chapter” debuted 9 p.m.-11 p.m. ET with Winfrey’s visit to the New Hampshire home of Steven Tyler. The two-hour debut brought in 1.1 million viewers during its premiere–not bad at all.
The show turns the once studio-bound Winfrey into a globe-trotting interviewer who drops into the home of a Hasidic Jewish family in New York, George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch in California and cook Paula Deen’s Georgia estate. There is also a trip with Sean Penn to Haiti, fire-walking with Tony Robbins and a planned India trip with Deepak Chopra.
Winfrey also is on-air with “Oprah’s Lifeclass,” which draws on her talk-show archives, and “Oprah’s Master Class,” a series of high-achiever biography specials. But, she said, she never “was supposed to carry the channel on my back, and it never was supposed to be about me being on the air as much as possible.”
“I would absolutely say it is and was not where I want it to be for year one,” Winfrey told The AP. “My focus up until (last) May was doing what I do best, which is ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show,’ and giving that my full attention” until its conclusion.
She attributes the channel’s rough start to a more basic error: The lack of a “library” of programming for the many hours of airtime not filled by original shows, compounded by overconfidence about her market value in general.
“I don’t understand what anybody was thinking. You’re going on the air, you’ve got four shows. What do you think you’re going to do by Tuesday? Did they think people were going to turn on the channel just because it had my name on it?”
She rejects the idea that a single year’s performance will determine OWN’s ultimate fate: “Somebody was talking to me in that kind of saddened, ‘How are you?’ tone, and I was thinking, ‘I’m fine,'” said Winfrey, who was the queen of daytime TV until she ended her talk show after 25 years.
“Everybody has told me — Ted Turner has told me, Barry Diller has told me, Lorne Michaels has told me, David Geffen has told me — anybody who’s ever worked with a channel, who’s ever done anything, has said it takes three to five years,” she said. “You have to do the work…You do not have to pay attention to the criticism.”
RBR-TVBR observation: Oprah’s brand of syndicated talk had many appeal factors that Anderson, The Doctors, The Dr. Oz Show, Dr. Phil and The Ellen DeGeneres Show emulated and grabbed audience share before and after she left. Part of the problem is yes, she didn’t appear on the network with a daily show (we think her upcoming weekend show will need to be repeated during the week), but also, her network didn’t have the reach and carriage that syndicated daytime shows have. It was a hard lesson learned—sometimes you can’t get by just on a name.
